piracy

Thoughts on COUNTER: Counterfeiting and Piracy Research Conference

/ Christopher Parsons

Last week I was a participant at the COUNTER: Counterfeit and Piracy Research Conference in Manchester, UK. I was invited to be part of a panel on deep packet inspection by Joseph Savirimuthu, as well as enjoy the conference more generally. It was, without a doubt, one of the best conferences that I have attended – it was thought-provoking and (at points) anger-inducing, good food and accommodations were provided, and excellent discussions were had. What I want to talk about are some of the resonating themes that coursed through the conference and try to situate a few of the positions and participants to give an insight into what was talked about.

The COUNTER project is a European research project exploring the consumption of counterfeit and pirated leisure goods. It has a series of primary research domains, including: (1) frequency and distribution of counterfeits; (2) consumer attitudes to counterfeit and pirated goods; (3) legal and ethical frameworks for intellectual property; (4) policy options for engaging with consumers of counterfeit; (5) the use of copyrighted goods for the creation of new cultural artifacts; (6) impacts of counterfeiting and control of intellectual property.

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Draft – Deep Packet Inspection: Privacy, Mash-ups, and Dignities

/ Christopher Parsons

This is a draft of the paper that I’ll be presenting at the Counter: Piracy and Counterfeit conference in Manchester in a few days. It’s still rough around some edges, but feels like a substantial piece. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Abstract:

Privacy operates as an umbrella-like concept that shelters liberal citizens’ capacity to enjoy the autonomy, secrecy, and liberty, values that are key to citizens enjoying their psychic and civil dignity. As digitisation sweeps through the post-industrial information economy, these same citizens are increasingly sharing and disseminating copywritten files using peer-to-peer file sharing networks. In the face of economic challenges posed by these networks, some members of the recording industries have sought agreements with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to govern the sharing of copywritten data. In Britain, file-sharing governance has recently manifested in the form of Virgin Media inserting deep packet inspection (DPI) appliances into their network to monitor for levels of infringing files. In this presentation, I argue that ISPs and vendors must demonstrate technical and social transparency over their use of DPI to assuage worries that communications providers are endangering citizens’ psychic and civil dignities. Drawing on recent Canadian regulatory processes concerning Canadian applications of DPI, I suggest that transparency between civil advocacy groups and ISPs and vendors can garner trust required to limit harms to citizens’ psychic dignity. Further, I maintain that using DPI appliances to detect copyright infringement and apply three-strikes proposals unduly threatens citizens’ civil dignities; alternate governance strategies must be adopted to preserve citizens’ civil dignity.

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Aggregating Information About CView

/ Christopher Parsons

cryingcopyrightOver the past little while there has been considerable attention focused on Virgin Media’s decision to trial Detica’s CView copyright monitoring system. This system uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to identify data protocols and likely files that are being transferred in order to generate a Copyright Infringement Index (i.e. a ‘Piracy Index’). As outlined by Detica, CView will let ISPs work with content creators to determine whether ISPs providing content through their portals lead to reductions in ‘infringing’ transfers of content through P2P file sharing.

The story about Detica’s involvement really broke with Chris Williams’ piece over at the Register entitled, “Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system.” In the piece, he recognized that the trial will encompass roughly 40% of Virgin’s customers, that the aim is to measure overall levels of filesharing rather than identify individual customers, and (at least initially) will focus on music. After I read the piece, I send some questions off to Detica and posted them (“Virgin to Use DPI to ID Copyright Infringement“) based on my reading of Williams’ piece and Detica’s consultation paper, and shortly thereafter followed up with Detica’s responses and thoughts on CView and privacy infringements (“Update to Virgin Media and Copyright DPI“). Between the posting of my questions, and the response from Detica, Richard Clayton had a meeting with representatives from Detica and posted the information they released to him over at Light Blue Touchpaper in a posting “What does Detica Detect?” The Register was also able to get face time with people working at Detica, leading Williams to produce his second piece “Spook firm readies Virgin Media filesharing probes.”

In the rest of this post, I want to pull together the information that has come to light so that we can get a better picture of what is known about CView. As such, this is very much a summary rather than an analytic post; hopefully I’ll have time to delve the information more critically in the near future.

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Piracy, Privacy, and Big Brother

/ Christopher Parsons

As an initial aside: Linux betas really are betas, nothing like the relatively polished (in comparison) betas that Redmond released.

Piracy or ‘Avast Me Mateys!’

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about software or music piracy, largely because I think that there are alternate sources that more effectively aggregate and deliver news about it. That said, I couldn’t resist commenting on Jennifer Pariser’s (head of litigation for Sony BMG) statements surrounding digital technologies. When under oath, Pariser responded to Richard Gabriel’s (the lead counsel for record labels) question of whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music they have purchased, stating,

When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’ (source).

Her comments directly point to why fair use is under such duress. More importantly, however, even when we apply the principle of charity to her general position, her comments seem to defy the public’s position on the matter. I don’t want to suggest that because people generally believe something that the law should reflect their beliefs – if that was the case then racial segregation would be more prominent than it is – but that when extensive public discourse has been undertaken and a common position is held by the deliberative participants, that their shared consensus should operate as the basis for developing legitimated law. I think that this discourse has, and continues to, occur in North America.

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